Alan Dershowitz: A Crime Against Humanity, A Crime Against Truth
Disgusting, despicable, deranged, demented. Pretty sharp lawyer also by many accounts but since when were such adjectives and “lawyer” mutually exclusive? (Not all lawyers, of course). At any rate, Felix Frankfurther Professor of Law or not, when it comes to his disgusting, despicable, deranged and demented advocacy for Israel, the verdict seems clear: Alan Dershowitz is a crime against humanity which is to say Alan Dershowitz advocates inhumanely and even inhumanly not to mention erroneously (to put it mildly). Here’s a reading exercise for the skeptic:
First, beg for, borrow or steal a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel and read it carefully, very carefully. Second, buy Norman G. Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History and do the same. Why? Because the latter directly addresses and largely refutes much of the former. You decide. Just don’t decide until you’re read both carefully (paying attention to the arguments and the evidence cited to support the arguments). Then tell me who’s made the case and why.
Make that lesson one in discerning prejudiced advocacy from critical scholarship. (You have to do this yourself. You cannot count on anyone else to do the comparative analysis.)
Second, consider some of these articles and exposés on the Felix Frankfurther Professor of the Perverse:
1. DePaul Genuflects to Dershowitz - by Howard Friel - 06/12/07 - ZNet
Friel actually spends little time discussing the debacle at DePaul (academia goes to hell thanks to a “Catholic” University!). His main and extensive focus is on showing how, “Dershowitz is in the vanguard, with the American Jewish Congress, of a major effort to modify international humanitarian law to further minimize the rights of civilians with the goal of ‘unshackling’ the United States and Israel in their various military campaigns.” With 47 references to support his argument, Friel aims to show that:
DePaul betrayed bedrock Catholic principles pertaining to the protection of civilians in armed conflict, and helped boost Dershowitz’s Medieval-dungeon views about international humanitarian law and human rights. This is easy to illustrate in the context of Dershowitz’s support of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in summer 2006.
The short of it (read the article yourself) is that during the Lebanon War (2006), Israel’s defense minister instructed the military to “disregard well-known rules in international law that protect civilians in armed conflict,” and that Israel’s top leaders made statements “that it would punish ‘Lebanon’ for the Hezbollah raid on July 12,” both of which “clearly indicate that Israel, from the beginning, rejected the civilian protections embodied in international humanitarian law throughout its bombing campaign in Lebanon.” Friel then backs all this up with the reports of various human rights organizations - Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, for example, document “the fact that such destruction was ‘deliberate,’ … and ‘indiscriminate,’ … without question”
posted by willtotruth @ 8:07 AM
<< Home